Prevent Blank Tabs from Opening When Downloading Files in Firefox

Have you ever noticed that often when you download a file in Firefox, a blank untitled tab will open for no reason? It’s not a huge nuisance since you can simply close the tab and go back to what you were doing, but of course it would be better if it didn’t happen at all.

Tab Mix Plus is a very popular Firefox addon, and probably the best addon for managing tabs. One of its features that you can enable is “prevent blank tabs when downloading files” in Firefox, which will solve our problem.

You will first need to download the Tab Mix Plus add-on. Now go to the Add-ons Manager by pressing “Ctrl + Shift + A” (CMD+Shift+A on Mac) and click on preferences next to Tab Mix Plus.

On the first main tab, enable the “prevent blank tabs when downloading files” option. Tab Mix Plus includes many other features that you may want to use as well, making it even more useful.

When you’re done click on “OK.” You should no longer see those pointless blank tabs when downloading files.